Hey there. My name is Alex. If you're new to Ticker Symbol YOU, welcome. This channel
focuses on connecting the dots between ARK Invest's technology and market research, stock
picks, and daily trading data. The goal is to highlight and track the best investment
opportunities among the companies that are transforming our daily lives. That means I
tend to focus on newer companies that are using advanced technologies to solve modern
problems that legacy companies aren't doing a great job solving for one reason or another.
Because ARK Invest's funds are all conviction-weighted and actively managed by the same person, Cathie
Wood, looking at their combined investing data should reveal the companies and trends
that the ARK Invest team feels will provide the best returns five years from now, given
today's valuations. Likewise, looking at the data within each fund should show us which
trends and technology platforms are currently winning in a given area, like genomics, fintech,
robotics, or energy storage. So, for the last year or so, I've been doing quarterly reviews
of ARK Invest's trading data to uncover these companies and trends. I've been calling these
quarterly reviews the State of the ARK but since there's just too much to cover in a
single episode, ARK Week is probably more appropriate. So, welcome to ARK Week. This
is part one, which reviews the changes in ARK Invest's positions when we combine their
six actively managed funds. Because I treat your time as an investment, this episode also
contains a quarterly review of Ticker Symbol YOU, so you can see what I've been up to and
how your investment is paying off big time. The next episodes, which will be released
shortly, will focus on the trading data within each of ARK Invest's individual funds and
the relevant news stories affecting their performance. You can watch these episodes
in any order and timestamps are enabled for your convenience.
So, let's get right into the data, starting with ARK Invest's assets under management,
or A U M, over the last quarter. The reason I always cover assets under management first
is because that's the baseline for looking at the changes in ARK Invest's positions.
On July 1st 2021, ARK Invest's funds totaled just over 49 billion dollars combined. On
September 27th, Cathie Wood's combined funds had just under 41 billion dollars in them,
marking a 17% decrease in total assets under management. Here's how that breaks down, fund
by fund. The AUM of ARKK, which is ARK Invest's flagship innovation fund, shrank by 17% over
the quarter, from 25.4 billion dollars to 21.1 billion dollars. The two things you should
know about ARKK are that it's bigger than all the other ARK funds combined and that
it contains no unique stocks, meaning any position inside ARKK is also inside at least
one other ARK fund. The other ARK Invest funds contain anywhere from 14 to 22 percent fewer
assets in them than at the start of the quarter, resulting in that total decrease of 17% I'm
talking about. Here's how I use that number. This is a table of all of ARK Invests positions
when you combine Cathie Wood's six actively managed funds. Each row is one stock, the
rows are ordered by ARK Invest's total investment in that stock, and the rows are colored by
the change in that total investment over the quarter RELATIVE TO the change in ARK Invest's
assets under management. So, positions that are in white shrank by around 17%, right in
line with ARK's funds overall. Green rows show positions that shrank by less than 17%,
meaning they grew relative to the funds, and red rows shrank by more than 17%, meaning
they shrank by more than ARK Invest's average. Using that framework for analyzing ARK Invest's
data, all we have to do is look for is the darkest green rows. Pretty cool, right?
Speaking of pretty cool, let me quickly point out two things that should save you even more
time before I walk through this data. First, this third column shows you the change in
share price for the stock between the start and end of the quarter. For example, many
of ARK Invest's top holdings like Teladoc, Roku, UiPath, and Zoom are trading at big
discounts compared to a quarter ago. Second, this entire State of the ARK presentation
is available for download, for free at ticker symbol you dot com, so you don't have to worry
about pausing to take screenshots unless you really want to. I'm building out ticker symbol
you dot com so you have easy access to all my resources and spreadsheets and presentations
without having to hunt through dozens of video descriptions to find them. Here's the full
link if you want to check it out and I'll put it in the description below as well. Great,
now let's go through the changes in ARK Invest's combined funds over the quarter.
The thing that I think all of Cathie Wood's biggest positions have in common is that most
investors are misunderstanding at least part of the bigger picture. That's certainly true
for Unity Software, ticker symbol U, UiPath, ticker symbol P A T H, and Palantir, ticker
symbol P L T R, all of which are massive billion-dollar positions that have increased by over 33 percent
in the last 3 months. Unity Software allows developers to create 2D and 3D interactive
experiences for every type of platform, including PCs and Macs, gaming consoles, and mobile
devices. Their primary audience right now is game developers, but they're extending
their development ecosystem to support much more than just video games. The thing Unity's
platform focuses on is lowering the barrier of entry to develop these visual experiences.
That means everyone, from artists and storytellers to doctors and engineers, can start bringing
their visions and visualizations to life much faster instead of having to learn a skill
that's very different from their existing skillset. As a result Unity Software is a
top 10 position inside ARKK, ARKW, ARKQ, and ARKX and it's worth noting that while the
stock rallied by almost 30% over the quarter, Cathie Wood has pretty much retained all of
her shares, indicating that she feels the stock will at least double from current prices
over the next 5 years.
UiPath, ticker symbol P A T H, is a software company that focuses on "RPA", or robotics
process automation. UiPath defines RPA as "a software technology that makes it easy
to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions interacting with
digital systems and software." So, they make software bots to replace work done by humans
through automation. Their bots are often used to manage simple but monotonous workflows
like copying and pasting data between programs, sending automated responses based on incoming
messages, or organizing large amounts of data based on a few rules. So, an example workflow
for UiPath's bots could be parsing emails to retrieve data that need to be entered in
a bunch of other forms or applications based on specified criteria. If that sounds like
your job, you're not alone; the total addressable market for robotics process automation is
massive, which is why UiPath is one of only two companies that Cathie Wood has in all
six ARK Invest funds. UiPath is currently trading over 20% lower than at the start of
the quarter and Cathie Wood has almost doubled her position in it as a result, which means
ARK Invest now owns close to 3% of the entire company. If that's not conviction, I don't
know what is.
Palantir, ticker symbol P L T R, builds advanced data analytics software platforms that are
used by the government and other large institutions. These same institutions tend to have the hardest
time with big data at scale because they were built well before the world went digital.
Palantir's software analyzes huge sets of data from many sources to help organizations
make better decisions, often in near real-time. So, where I think Palantir REALLY adds value
is by helping these large companies quickly make what's called the "digital twin" of their
organization and then solving several key big data challenges to get their client solutions
up and running very quickly. Palantir is also extending their reach to smaller companies
and even start-ups through their new Foundry for Builders program. Because their technologies
are so industry-agnostic, Palantir is the other stock that's in all six ARK Invest's
funds. Palantir's stock price has been steadily climbing basically all quarter, so Cathie
Wood has been buying and selling shares as a result. Even with some of her big recent
sales, Cathie Wood is holding almost 25% more shares and 35% more money in Palantir today
than at the start of the quarter, making it ARK Invest's 12th biggest position overall
when you combine their 6 actively managed funds. I spend a lot of time talking about
Palantir because I used to be a rocket scientist and radar engineer on government projects
at MIT, where I focused on big data, artificial intelligence, and automated decision support.
I'm not saying that to toot my own horn; I'm mentioning that because it's the exact kind
of work that Palantir helps some of their biggest clients do at scale through their
Gotham platform, which was their first and is currently still their biggest platform,
so I feel I can add a little value to the Palantir conversation.
Draftkings, ticker symbol D K N G, has also made it into ARK Invest's top 20 positions
this past quarter after Cathie Wood increased her share count by almost 24%. Draftkings
is a suite of integrated apps for paid fantasy sports, online sports betting or OSB, and
iGaming, which are casino games like blackjack and slots. One reason they're three separate
apps is because those activities can be regulated differently in each state, so there are nuances
when it comes to what Draftkings can offer, promote, cross-sell, and so on within each
app. The Draftkings integrated platform allows them to use data from each of these apps to
target ads and personalize experiences on any one of them. They can also do cool things
like generating custom bets in real-time based on what's going on in live sports events.
Draftkings is in the process of acquiring Golden Nugget Online Gaming, ticker symbol
G N O G, for $1.5 billion dollars and they're building an NFT-based collectibles marketplace
for things like digital sports cards. Because of the wide variety of innovations coming
out of Draftkings in the realm of digital sports and casino gaming, D K N G stock finds
itself in ARKK, as well as ARKW and ARKF, ARK Invest's funds focused on next-generation
internet applications and fintech innovations, respectively. If you're interested in my full-length
deep dives on Unity Software, UiPath, Palantir, or Draftkings, I've created one convenient
playlist for you with all of them and many more. I'll leave a link to that in the top
right-hand corner of your screen right now and in the description below as well. Note
that all four of these stocks - Unity Software, UiPath, Palantir, and Draftkings are also
big positions in ARKW, which I'll cover more in the next generation internet application
portion of ARK Week.
If we instead sort this table by the percent change in position size instead of ARK Invest's
total position size, we get the list of positions that Cathie Wood increased the most over the
quarter. Since your time is valuable and many of these positions are very small, I won't
go through these one by one. Instead, I'll highlight a few things that I hope you find
helpful. First, here are Unity, UiPath, Palantir, and Draftkings again, so you can see where
they land among all of these other increased positions. The reason I highlighted them in
this episode instead of waiting to talk about them when I cover each individual fund is
that they're by far the highest-ranking positions on this list, which makes these increases
the biggest positive changes in ARK Invest's conviction overall. If that's not clicking
for you, trust me, I totally get it. If you look back at my earlier content, it took me
a while to really figure out a logically consistent way to look at all this data. Let me say it
another way: these are the positions that were already fairly close to ARK's position
in Tesla at the start of the quarter that ended up moving even closer to their Tesla
position at the end of the quarter. Tesla, ticker symbol T S L A, is ARK Invest's number
1 position and that rank hasn't changed, while Unity Software was ARK Invest's 11th biggest
position 90 days ago and is their third biggest position now, bringing it much closer to Tesla
in terms of ARK Invest's overall conviction in the company, since these funds are all
conviction weighted.
That increase in overall position can be because Cathie Wood bought more shares or because
she decided not to sell shares after they jumped in price, so I like to look at the
change in share count and change in price together to see which stocks Cathie Wood bought
a lot of and which of those are still down in price. Those are the ones I'd research
first since there might be a good near-term buying opportunity among them. Those would
be Quantum SI, ticker symbol Q S I, Signify Health, S G F Y, Verve Therapeutics, V E R
V, Stoneco, S T N E, Aerovironment, A V A V, UiPath, P A T H, Repare Therapeutics, R
P T X, and Roblox, R B L X. If you don't mind stocks that went sideways instead of their
price going down, you can add Disney, ticker symbol D I S, Komatsu, K M T U Y, Discovery,
D S Y, Draftkings, D K N G, and Jaws Spitfire, S P F R, to the list. Stocks like Signify
Health and Roblox, as well as Etsy, ticker symbol E T S Y, Arcturus Therapeutics, A R
C T, Veracyte, V C Y T, and Pagerduty, ticker symbol P D, are also interesting because they
increased to the point where they're nearing ARK Invest's Top 50 or even Top 30 positions,
out of roughly 160 or so positions in total. Typically, what I do when I see this happen
is throw these companies on my watch list and start researching them as best I can.
For example, what does ARK Invest know about Etsy that I don't? Can I put aside what I
think I know about Etsy and find the reason that Cathie Wood almost doubled her position
in it over the quarter? This is what I mean by data-driven investing and not letting my
gut feelings rule out certain stocks. Comment below with your thoughts on these companies.
Are there any that specifically interest you? If so, how come? Are there any you want to
learn more about or want me to do a deep dive on? Should any of these other companies be
in the 100 thousand dollar public portfolio I'm starting when Ticker Symbol YOU reaches
100 thousand subscribers, or at least be on that watch list? I'm excited to hear your
thoughts and I'll cover these companies in more detail in the next parts of ARK Week.
Speaking of data-driven investing and Ticker Symbol YOU... how's that for a smooth segue...
I treat your time as an investment, so here's how your investment is growing and what you
can expect going forward. This past quarter was my first full quarter since I quit my
day job to pursue my passions in research, technology, investing, and video journalism.
I quit back in May, just in time for growth stocks to collapse, along with my portfolio,
ARK Invest's portfolios, and of course, the interest in this channel. All of those things
are just now starting to break even. And that's great because, as you know, the best time
to double down is near the bottom, so that's what I did. I made 23 new episodes, almost
double what I could make before I went full-time. I switched from talking about world-changing
technologies and ARK Invest's Big Ideas to talking about the stocks that I felt were
crashing the hardest and the biggest opportunities I saw to buy into that future. Even with almost
none of my videos this quarter touching my top 10, it was my best quarter ever in terms
of views and the channel is slowly creeping toward 5 million views and 100 thousand subscribers,
with its one-year anniversary still ahead of us. I'm really happy I can add a little
value to so many people each week. That added value also seems to have attracted all sorts
of potential sponsors: Finance apps, social media platforms, advertising agencies, VPN
solutions, the list goes on and on. I don't use the products or services from any of them,
so I rejected them. Denying sponsors that are irrelevant to my audience is another way
I can respect your time. After almost a year, I'm just now starting to engage with a handful
of sponsors that I don't see a lot of other finance channels talk about. I'm not going
to say which ones just yet but I'm excited to work with them because they're all directly
focused on education, investing, or both and they're all brands I feel have a lot of integrity,
which means a lot to me. Another way I can respect your time is by cutting one ad per
video, which I've been doing since this channel became eligible for ads last Winter. If each
ad is a quarter minute long and every viewer is spared one ad, that's 375,000 minutes of
ads I spared you this quarter. Or over 250 days. In total, I've saved my viewers over
2 YEARS of combined ad watching since I've started cutting ads on this channel. I'm really
proud of that, ARKF those ads.
Speaking of things I'm proud of, the only reason I can keep cutting ads and denying
sponsors is because of the wonderful support of my Patrons on Patreon and channel members,
right here on YouTube. Hundreds of people go above and beyond by supporting the channel
each and every month and that means the world to me. Supporters get a ton of extra and exclusive
content, including monthly Q and A videos, access to all my data dashboards, like the
one featured in this episode, early access to the State of the ARK, and I'm pretty consistently
adding new benefits over time. Here are some other things I'm proud of that happened this
quarter. I interviewed Simon Barnett, one of ARK Invest's Analysts focused on the genomics
revolution. Simon and I talked for over 2 hours and he taught me a ton about the innovations
coming to every aspect of health care. Simon, if you're watching, I'd be happy to have you
back on the channel. Likewise, if any other analyst from ARK Invest is interested in an
interview, slide on into my DMs on Twitter at ticker symbol you, and I'll make it happen.
Another thing I'm really proud of is the Ticker Symbol YOU podcast. Every episode is a re-edited
and digitally mastered audio version of these YouTube episodes. The Ticker Symbol YOU podcast
is only about 4 months old and is already one of the Top 10 Tech News Podcasts on Apple
Podcasts in Norway, Singapore, and Thailand, so a big thank you to the twelve people that
listen to me on Apple in those countries. If you're interested, you can find the podcast
on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher as well. Now let's talk about the future.
Here's what you can expect going forward as we enter the final quarter of 2021: as I mentioned
earlier, I'm starting a 100,000 dollar portfolio when the channel hits 100,000 subscribers,
which I expect to happen sometime in the next 3 months. Instead of comparing the Ticker
Symbol YOU portfolio to the indexes, we're going to compare its performance to Cathie
Wood and ARKK over a 5-year stretch, which is ARK Invest's time horizon... or however
long it takes for me to admit defeat! I'll also be reorganizing my 4000 member discord
community to focus more on the stock market and investing, not just technology platforms
and innovation. That Discord community is another thing I'm really proud of, so if you're
interested in joining that and helping me with this crazy idea, I'll leave a link to
it in the description below. I strongly believe that almost nobody understands technology
and exponential growth like Cathie Wood and ARK Invest's analysts, so no matter what the
results are, I want to make it clear that the goal of this portfolio to provide a fun,
interactive, and educational investment experience using my own money. To me, that's a great
way to level up the channel that invests in you. If you're interested in seeing the moves
in that portfolio as they happen instead of waiting for me to cover them in a video, consider
joining the hundreds of people supporting the channel as Patrons on Patreon or channel
members right here on YouTube. That's one of those new benefits for supporters I was
just talking about. If not, that's totally cool, I'll talk about the portfolio at least
once a month and recap the biggest changes, good or bad. Either way, thank you for investing
some of your precious time with me each week and letting me talk about the channel every
quarter. That really means a lot to me. In the next episodes of ARK Week, it's right
back to business. I'll highlight the biggest trends and holdings changes I see in each
of ARK Invest's individual funds. Then, I'll let the data and your feedback keep deciding
what content comes next. After all, this is ticker symbol you. My name is Alex, reminding
you that the best investment you can make... is in you.